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The atrocities Syrians suffered did not take place in a 14-year vacuum of civil war, spurred by the anti-government uprising that started in 2011. They spanned many decades from late Ottoman and French rule, through the reign of Hafez Al Assad and under the subsequent rule of his son, Bashar Al Assad. A transitional justice process that neglects to address these deeper, pre-2011 historical legacies of injustice risks producing – and reproducing – social and sectarian divisions that have long marked the country’s history. The historical legacies of injustice in Syria that continue to play out today have thus left a colossal task of reckoning with such a complex past.

Syria